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The Televised Community: Culture, Politics, and the Market of Visual Representation in India

Britta Ohm

Frankfurt, Oder: European University Viadrina, Faculty of Cultural Sciences, Doctoral Thesis (2007), 384 pp.

"This thesis provides, firstly, an analysis of the interplay of transnational media corporations, particularly Rupert Murdoch's Star TV, in their pursuit of creating profitable national consumer markets, preferably in a democracy like India, with the anti-minority politics, modes of popular/populist ... mobilisation and discursive strategies of Hindu nationalism. It looks at the economic, technological, medial, political, social, visual/iconographic and legal aspects of this interplay and delineates their concrete manifestations in news as well as in entertainment programming of everyday television (particularly in very popular shows and channels at the time). These aspects are set into the larger framework of globalisation, privatisation, commercialisation and neo-liberal policies, the related thrusts of social upward mobility (especially in the new middle classes), ‘good governance’ (instead of socio-economic justice) and shifting class-, caste-, majority-minority and national-regional relations in the context of a re-formulation of nation and state that defines and legitimises new logics of inclusion and exclusion. Secondly, this work is a study of "Indianisation" and lingual/representational politics in the context of the growing precariousness of the liberal-secular discourse and of democratic, independent mass media in India. Especially English-language journalists, whose largely critical coverage of the anti-Muslim violence experienced an hitherto unknown rejection on the part of TV audiences (and consequently produced a slump in advertising revenues), turned with the Gujarat crisis out to epitomise the ambivalence of challenging the definitional power of a privileged postcolonial class: its rightful critique carries the danger of vindicating and naturalising anti-minority cultural nationalism. The study follows and examines, before the background of a normative construction of a Hindi-speaking, ‘authentic’ media consumer, the changing position of both English and Hindi-producing journalists and producers, their respective perceptions of alienation, speechlessness and empowerment, their unwanted role as activists in the context of shifting meanings of 'neutrality' and 'objectivity', their difficulties or agility in assessing their options and maintaining, changing or even developing their convictions, and the strategies they find or reject for adapting to the circumstances." (Abstract) more

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Ist dies eine Invasion? Transnationale Sender und nationales Fernsehen in Indien

Britta Ohm

Hamburg: Lit (2001), 168 pp.

"Während wir bisher nur sehr vage wissen, wie eine globale Welt aussehen könnte, haben sich neben den Finanzmärkten die Medien bereits sichtbar als ihre wichtigsten Protagonisten hervorgetan. Anhand des Fernsehens, das sich innerhalb der letzten zehn Jahre von einem Konstrukteur nationaler Öffen ... more

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Image Journeys: Audio-Visual Media and Cultural Change in India

Christiane Brosius, Melissa Butcher (eds.)

New Delhi; Thousand Oaks; London: Sage (1999), 338 pp.

"This volume examines the influence of audio-visual media in cultural change in India. The essays focus on: the dynamics of network change; the relationships between image and viewer; and the journey of images between points of reading in contemporary India that are mediated through television, cine ... more